


question all the "me"s i've let you meet

by Duck_Life



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mind Games, The Dark Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Hunt Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Lonely Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Power Of Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Jon and Martin get separated on the way to the top of the tower. Now the Archivist must travel through each floor alone-- well, not completely alone.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

It’s not comfortable, the fog. It clings to his throat and hands, mists across his face and hair like dew. Leaves him feeling cold and clammy, aching for something solid, some spot of softness and warmth in this wasteland. No, the fog isn’t comfortable, but it is… welcome?

Not welcome, that’s not the word. Familiar. Familiar, like the shape of a tape recorder in his hand, the smell of tobacco, the old twinge in his back from a lifetime of poor posture. Jon wipes at his glasses, where the fog is beginning to condense and obscure his vision. 

He needs to be able to see. 

Why is that important again? Jon’s not sure, just knows that it is. If he can see, he can move forward. If he can move forward, he can stop… all of this. 

All of what? His head feels heavy and light at the same time. Fog floats around him, familiar. Friendly? Is the fog here for him? 

Does he like it?

Does he want it? 

There is no tape recorder in his hand right now. No cigarette either, no hand to hold or blanket to tug around his shoulders, no steaming cup of tea or strap of a rucksack. His hands are empty, grasping. What is he looking for? What is he Looking for? 

“I d— I don’t think I should be here,” Jon says, suddenly realizing he can’t remember the last time he spoke aloud. His voice does not echo, just gets swallowed up in the fog. “Hello? Hello? I don’t think I’m supposed to—”

“ _ Yes, you are _ .” The voice that answers his is pleasant, brings to mind empty beaches and vacant, rolling fields. 

Jon’s eyes roam; his head swivels, looking for anyone in the grayness around him. “Who are you?”

“ _ Who are you _ ?” the voice parrots back, and he… he… 

His name. He had a name, must have, just a moment ago. But when the voice asks for it, he realizes that he can’t find it. Searches, with the anxiety of someone realizing they’ve left their wallet in the pocket of their other trousers, with the heartrending fear of a mother losing her child in an airport. He has no name. Has he ever had a name? 

There was a title, he thinks. Something more than a name, something less than a name as well. Something... someone… “Do you know me?” the man asks the emptiness. 

The voice laughs. It seems like a shape is beginning to emerge from the fog, someone tall and broad. “ _ No one knows you _ ,” the voice responds. “ _ You are not Known in this place. You will never be known again _ .” 

“No…” He shakes his head, trying to clear out the cobwebs— Cobwebs? No, no, cobwebs… spiders are something else. Spiders are something else, and this is— “The Lonely. I’m… I’m Lonely.” 

“ _ Does that scare you? _ ”

He wants to say no, but he also doesn’t want to lie. For some reason, telling the truth feels important. He promised to tell the truth, didn’t he, to say how he was really feeling? He promised, he promised someone… he promised—

“Martin,” the man gasps, eyes wild now as he searches the fog. He can’t remember his own name, but he remembers a man with freckles and wildly curling hair, a man who holds him and stays with him when he is harsh and cold, a man who loves him. A man who must surely be trapped here as well. “Martin! Martin, can you hear me?”

“ _ I can hear you, Jon _ ,” the voice says, and the man— Jon, is that his name? Does that name belong to him?— feels his heart sink. Slowly, the figure from before shimmers into clarity. The freckles, the wildly curling hair. Of course Jon recognizes him. “ _ I can hear you. But that doesn’t make you any less Alone, does it _ ?”

“No, n-no, Martin,” Jon says, trying to reconcile the man in the mist with the man in his memories. “Hey, h-hey, I’m here. You don’t have to… I’m here, and I love you. You— you’re not Lonely anymore, remember? Remember that?” 

_ “Oh, Jon _ .” Martin doesn’t sound scared or confused or even resigned. He sounds… he sounds like he’s enjoying the show. He sounds almost as jovial as Peter Lukas.  _ “It’s alright, you know. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. You don’t have to worry about anyone ever again. They certainly aren’t worried about you _ .” 

“Martin… Martin, this isn’t you,” Jon pleads. “Look at me. Alright? Just… just Look at me.”

_ “I am looking,”  _ Martin says.  _ “I see a sad, bitter man who has shed every connection to other people he ever had. He is remembered by no one. He is loved by no one. _ ”

The words burrow like worms into his skull. If Martin’s saying it, it must be true, right? Martin doesn’t lie to him. Martin wouldn’t— 

Martin wouldn’t. 

Martin wouldn’t go back to the Lonely. Martin wouldn’t make a game out of tormenting him. Martin wouldn’t say these things. Which means—

“You’re not Martin,” Jon snarls, letting the truth of it warm him like a furnace in his chest. “Martin… Martin loves me.” The fog is all around him, stifling, smothering, but he’s fighting it now. “Martin loves me and I love him and I am  _ not _ alone.” 

And like so much mist, the image of Martin standing in front of him blows away with the rest of the fog. 

With the fog gone, the truth flows right back to Jon. Right. The Panopticon. The dreadful tower of the Ceaseless Watcher, each floor dedicated to its own entity. Apparently, floor one belongs to the Lonely. 

He can only guess at where the  _ real _ Martin is right now— perhaps having his own encounter with the Lonely? He searches for a moment, deciding this counts as an emergency in which he’s not breaking any boundaries by Looking for Martin, but the Eye reveals nothing. Of course, that’s probably the Panopticon’s doing. The Eye cannot see within itself. 

So. Alright. They knew this might happen, knew they might get separated once inside the tower. The plan was to keep moving forward no matter what, and trust each other to meet back up at the top. He trusts Martin, trusts him more than he trusts death or taxes. 

It’s unsettling how easily the Lonely managed to shake that trust. 

Nothing to be done. Nothing to be done. On to the second floor.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cw guns, violence, jon thinking he's a monster

Panting, trembling, Jon crouches down behind the filing cabinet. There’s a rust-colored stain on one corner of it that he’s trying not to think about. This place… it’s too clean to be the Archives, smells of disinfectant and floor wax. It reminds him a little of that first office job he took right out of university, full of mind-numbing paperwork and an endless corporate clamber to the top. 

He’s not completely sure what he’s hiding from, but his instincts are screeching at him like static.  _ Don’t let him find you. Don’t let him hurt you _ . With clammy hands, he tries to reach into his bag for a knife or a rock,  _ anything _ he can use to defend himself. 

But he’s too late. 

He feels the end of a gun pointed at the back of his head. Hears the sound of it cocking. His heart stutters in his aching ribcage. 

“Stand up,” the man with the gun orders. “ _ Slowly _ .” 

Jon complies, carefully holding his hands out to show the man he isn’t holding anything. Not that it matters. He knows, implicitly, that his crime lies in who he is and what he’s done, has nothing to do with what he might be holding. 

“Turn around.” 

He does, and finds himself looking right into the scarred and battered face of Martin Blackwood. Martin’s jaw is set tight and his gun is pointed directly at Jon’s heart. 

“You have any idea,” Martin says, “how long I’ve been coming after you?” 

Jon exhales, feeling his lungs ache with fear. “Sometimes it feels like my whole life,” he admits. Martin presses the gun to his chest, and Jon can feel his heart hammering, the feel of cold metal through his shirt. 

“Life?” Martin sneers. “Your life? You don’t have a life. You have… a fucking reign of terror. You’re a monster, Archivist. I’m here to put you down.” 

He thinks the man with the gun didn’t used to have all those scars. He thinks the man with the gun might have been kind to him once, might have touched him gently, might have soothed him, brought him tea, spoken kind words about trust and faith in a voice not hoarse with anger. But Jon has trouble remembering sometimes. 

And he’s scared. So scared it’s hard to think clearly. So maybe this is it, then. His end. A monster, being shot by a monster hunter in an abandoned office building. 

“Just,” he says, weakly. “Make it quick.”

Martin laughs harshly. “You want a quick kill, huh?” he scoffs. “After all you’ve done. After the way you savored all your victims, returning in their nightmares for seconds. You really think you deserve a quick death?” 

“I… I don’t know.” He chokes, realizing belatedly that there are tears in his eyes. A monster who cries. Does the hunter find that strange? Jon can’t tell.

Maybe all of them cry at the end. 

Martin moves the gun back a little, room for Jon to breathe. “What? You’re not going to try and  _ compel _ me, then? Not going to try and make your escape?”

“I’m done running,” Jon says, and it feels like the truth. It feels like the truest thing he’s said. “You’re here to kill me. And… and I can face that. I won’t hurt you, and I… I can’t run anymore. I know that now.” 

Martin looks almost thoughtful. He nods, understanding, and then pulls the trigger. 

Jon shuts his eyes instinctively. He hears the gunshot, but he never feels the impact. No sudden pain in his chest, no pressure on his heart. All he feels is a small twinge where his missing ribs aren’t. 

When he opens his eyes, Martin and the gun are gone. And there’s an elevator up ahead, yawning open and greeting him with a flickering yellow light. 

Jon takes a couple of deep breaths, touches his hand to his heart, and then he goes on ahead to the next floor. 


	3. Chapter 3

The third level of the Panopticon is just black. 

The glow from the elevator doesn’t reach whatever is around Jon. It sits, stagnant, the only spot of light in a completely dark room. As soon as Jon steps out, the elevator doors snap shut and he’s in complete darkness. 

“Okay,” Jon says, trying to amp himself up. “Alright them. Just have to… to walk forward, then. I guess.” 

So he does. One foot in front of the other, unable to see even the outline of his own hand in front of his face. One benefit of this complete lack of light means at least there are no shadows. The dark never changes, just blankets him like thick ink. There are no sudden movements visible in the darkness, no mysterious lurking shapes in the corners of his vision. 

If only that meant he couldn’t  _ hear _ anything, either.

There are noises in the dark, sounds of scurrying and rustling. It could be nothing… except that Jon Knows the kind of things that hide in the dark. The forces that spill out of and into vessels, the thing that was in Maxwell Rayner and the things that swarm across Night Street. He Knows too much. 

Maybe all this would be easier if he were, in fact, “in the dark” about the Dark. Regrettably, he stumbles forward with his hands in front of him, terrified of what he might come across. 

There’s no way of knowing how far he has to go to reach the next floor. He tries to Know it, but the Dark seeps over his mind like tar, obscuring anything about his current situation. As much as the powers of the Beholding frighten him, they’ve also become somewhat reliable as of late. 

Being without them worries him to the pit of his stomach, makes him feel bare and vulnerable in this unseeable place. 

Jon takes a step, then another. As a child, he was never that afraid of the dark. (At least, not until Mr. Spider made him realize there really  _ might _ be monsters in his closet or beneath his bed.) 

He never owned a nightlight. Not a special blanket, either. He did have a sea turtle that his grandmother purchased for him on a trip to the aquarium. Sheldon, he’d named it. (He was not a very original child.) 

When he missed his mother, when he longed to remember what his father might have looked like, he’d clutch Sheldon the sea turtle tight. In the sleepless nights after he watched his bully taken by a giant spider, never to be seen again, Jon would cling to his sea turtle and think about every fact he’d ever learned about the creatures, drowning out memories with knowledge.

Turtles follow the moon to make their way back to the sea. It’s why light pollution is so bad for sea turtle populations. The more neon bar signs and flashing adverts, the harder it is for the sea turtles to find their way. 

There is no moonlight here. No bright billboards or city lights, either. There is nothing but the dark. Still, Jon walks. He imagines he is walking in the direction of the moon, or maybe Martin. Everything ends, he reminds himself. Even the darkness. 

It’s just about then that a clammy hand wraps around his wrist. “Jesus Christ,” Jon shouts, immediately trying to snatch his hand back. Whoever has it clings tightly, cold fingers clamped in a complete circle around his thin wrist. Jon stumbles, wishing again that he could  _ see _ . 

An arm loops around his shoulders, holding him firmly. He can’t keep walking. He’s trapped now, locked in the embrace of someone, some _ thing _ , in the endless darkness. 

“Let me go,” Jon pleads.

The thing in the darkness laughs. “No.” His voice is achingly familiar, and Jon nearly sinks to his knees. Is this going to happen every time?

“Martin,” Jon says, begs. “Please. Just let me keep going.” 

“You don’t even know where you’re going,” Martin counters. “You can’t see. You could be walking right into a brick wall. Or a great fall. Hm. That might be kind of funny, actually. Maybe I  _ should _ let you go.” 

“Martin, this isn’t you—”

“It is though,” Martin responds, refusing to let Jon budge. Jon cranes his neck, trying desperately to look at Martin. He still can’t see a damn thing, not the glint of Martin’s glasses or the outline of his face. “Unseen. Unknown. It’s a natural protection against the Eye, isn’t it? I don’t have to worry about doing anything wrong or getting judged. I can do… whatever… I… want.” As if to illustrate his point, he squeezes the bones of Jon’s hand until Jon cries out in pain. 

“I don’t understand,” Jon says. “Wh— Where’s the  _ real _ Martin?”

“You’ve always cared so much about what’s real and what isn’t,” Martin sighs. “I still remember you when you first started recording statements, making such a big show of denouncing anyone who happened to run into a monster after they had a couple pints in them. In the Dark, none of that matters. If seeing is believing, then… then what happens when you can’t see anything? It could all be real. It could all be fake. You’d never know.” 

“I…” Jon sighs, still desperate to look at the Martin that’s holding him now. And then he remembers something from a statement, something about the Dark and its powers. What happens if he isn’t  _ trying  _ to look anymore?

And so Jon closes his eyes. 

Instantly, he feels the hands around his wrist and neck slip away, like tendrils drifting off into the darkness. Jon walks forward confidently, not even bothering to hold his hands in front of him. If he walks into a wall, so be it. A bonk on the head is hardly the worst injury he’s faced. 

He walks until his feet kick against something— a step. Feeling it out, he realizes he’s walked right into a stairwell. Jon keeps his eyes shut tight and begins to ascend. 

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this a few months ago and figured I'd better start publishing it before the show's over! It COULD take place within 192. After all, who knows what happens when the tape recorder is off?


End file.
